A strange question: what is the square root of reality?
After toying around with the question in my notebook, I came up with a tentative answer: existence. The simplest way for me to explain why this is so–aside from trawling for an array of sources to provide confirmatory evidence–is to make a statement:
Those who exist create reality and inhabit it.
I think this is true and I hope you do, too. However, it gets trickier. Part of my “toying around” involved writing out the sum that supposedly makes reality. Specifically:
existence x existence = reality
What really draws my attention in that sum, though, is the multiplication sign. What exactly does it symbolise, stand for? Personally, I think it symbolises change. And as I was thinking about square roots, I began to think about root causes. This sprouted another strange question:
Why do things change?
Confession: the idea that we don’t know the fundamental cause of change (a.k.a. “time”) was brought to my attention by a Stephen Hawking book. It’s low-key haunted me since then and I don’t really know what to do about it.
Additional confession: I used to think such second-rate (or third, fourth, even fifth-rate) philosophising was pointless. Banal. Useless. A complete waste of my time, and of yours, dear reader. A part of me still feels that way. But a growing part of me opposes that view. A growing part of me thinks that idle thoughts have the same relation to insight as procrastination does to productivity. The two are inextricably linked, co-dependent upon one another.
In a complex world–a world that houses billions of actors and is susceptible to countless contributing, contradictory forces–who am I to say one idea is idle and another is not? Who am I to presume that, given what we know about higher order effects and network dynamics, x will matter more than y?
Swell & Cut 